CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Wide-ranging studies demonstrate a correlation between social conditions and life outcomes, a fact that Jamar Adams holds close to his heart as he works to destigmatize affordable housing by developing low-and-middle-income communities in Manhattan's Chelsea district.
Adams is best known for his career with the National Football League, having played as a safety with teams such as the Seattle Seahawks and the Philadelphia Eagles. In a speech last Friday at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD) hosted by the Real Estate Development Club, Adams divulged that his experience growing up in an affordable housing community in Charlotte, North Carolina, formed the social impact centric approach that his company, Essence Development, infuses into their developments.
“Some of the ways we're developing and some of the things we're doing are not really sustainable,” said Adams of Essence's social impact-focused approach. “I want a place where every kid has the same opportunity as Stephen Ross' daughter, or that my kids have. It shouldn't matter based upon how much money you have. It should be based upon the grit you have or how hard you willing to work. It's just a matter [of] how much, how hard we work for it.”
Adams' speech, which was free of cost to attend, was titled “Essence Development Presentation.” He spoke to a room of 55 attendees, most of whom were graduate students at Harvard's GSD, of Essence's social impact philosophy and how it informed their development of two new project sites, Chelsea and Chelsea Addition.
Essence's development philosophy for the Chelsea development is focused on six areas with the greatest potential for affecting social mobility: sustainable housing, connectivity, workforce training, affordable healthcare, education and healthy food.
The heart of the Chelsea development sites is a 15,000-square-foot multipurpose community building, complete with office spaces for Essence' service partners, medical suites, community rooms and maker spaces. Having them physically located within the development goes a long way to ensure that residents feel their input is valued.
Adams criticized his fellow developers for placing more emphasis on appearances rather than outcomes. “A lot of people like to give away turkeys and book bags during holidays. But turkeys and book bags don't necessarily change people's outcomes.”
What changes residents' life outcomes, Adams firmly believes, are the conditions they live in.
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the largest landlord in New York City. According to NYCHA's website, they own over 177,569 apartments in the city and serve one in 16 city residents. However, the apartments offered by NYCHA often fail to meet expectations. In his slide deck, Adams included photographs of apartments Essence bought from NYCHA that had visible mold growth on ceilings and walls, frayed cloth insulation in electric breaker boxes, kitchens without countertops or storage spaces, and rusting pipes.
“The conditions they (NYCHA's tenants) live in are deplorable,” Adams thundered, castigating NYCHA for their substandard offerings. “What happens when you live in a condition like that? What do you think about yourself? When your children think like you, what do they think about themselves? How do they find value when everything around them is deteriorating?”
Adams' first order of business was putting residents first. In Essence's Riverwalk Park development on Roosevelt Island, marble was used extensively in the lobby to lend an air of quality to the development.
“We endeavor to build high quality housing,” said Adams, beaming as he showed off photos of Riverwalk Park's lobby. He takes particular pride when people walk into one of his affordable housing developments and declare them indistinguishable from market rate apartment buildings.
High quality does not stop at the lobby, however. Essence plans on implementing many quality-of-life improvements to both renovated and new-build apartment buildings at the Chelsea and Chelsea Addition sites. Such improvements include larger elevators able to fit a hospital gurney, high efficiency water and heating systems, photovoltaic panels built into the building's exterior cladding and better insulation of each apartment.
Though Essence's attention to quality and detail is unusual in the affordable housing development space, their real innovation is involving residents in the design process.
Essence has a design committee of four people who meet with interior designers to come up with ideas about how living spaces should look. Residents then get to walk through mock ups of the apartments and vote on their favorite designs.
“[They] get to ultimately decide,” Adams said, “based upon a vote what [they] have for kitchen counters, the color, the appliances, the bathrooms, et cetera.”
Essence's efforts to involve residents intrigued GSD postdoctoral researcher Emmanuel Kofi Gavu, whose research specialization encompasses affordable housing in his home country of Ghana.
Gavu was particularly impressed by the extent residents were involved, because soliciting resident feedback helps Essence, a for-profit entity, see beyond the profit motive of real estate development and grounds them to their mission of creating social impact. “They have other teams just looking at feedback from the community on a constant basis. That's very important for such projects.”
Community involvement goes beyond residents deciding on the design of their apartments. Adams hopes to integrate open space into his developments to foster wider community integration to combat the stigma surrounding affordable housing and the resulting segregation.
“What I want to do is create an inviting community,” Adams exhorted the crowd. “I want the (societal) fabric to integrate. I don't want people to say, ‘listen, they live in those $10 million condos. We've been here for 60 years.’ No, no, no. This is one community. How do we come together? I think that's one issue in our country right now.” ◼